UNDER THE PAVEMENT LIES THE STRAND
(aka UNTER DEM PFLASTER IST DER STRAND)
dir. Helma Sanders-Brahms, 1975
Germany, 99 min.
In German with English subtitles.

THURSDAY, MARCH 12 – 10 PM
WEDNESDAY, MARCH 18 – 7:30 PM
FRIDAY, MARCH 27 – 10 PM

A sociological document on the working woman and abortion, an anti-matrimonial and anti-utopian communist manifesto, Unter dem Pflaster is an intimate chronicle of post-68 malaise and the growing schism between sexual and political revolutions. An illicit and ludic affair between two actors with a shared past in the student rebellions opens up onto the history of German revolution and fascism, the constraints of domestic monogamy and claustrophobia of private property, as they watch themselves become the very parents they mutinied against. Caught at a crux of early postmodernity, Sanders-Brahms pinpoints the exigency of a women’s movement in the stale husk of ’68 macho militancy and growing recuperation in post-Fordist women’s reformism.